Living in the Past

THERE IS A great danger in asking two dozen distinguished graduates of Harvard and Yale to reminisce in print about their college years. For most such figures, those were years of outstanding academic achievement, featuring meaningful friendships with influential professors and culminating in attractive fellowships and job-offers in short, just the sort of years that lend themselves, in all but the most prudent hands, to reminiscence of a singularly smug and irritating nature--especially, one might add, to an undergraduate reader.

And so it is with My Harvard, My Yale, the newest of a recent spate of compilations of Harvard memoirs. Last spring saw the publication of Our Harvard, in which prominent alumni reflected on their Cambridge years. The Harvard Book (a new edition of an old high-school prize chestnut), and Sons of Harvard, which considered the undergraduate experience of gay alumni. This one's contribution to the literature is its inclusion of equal time from the competition: half the book (the second half, be assured) is given over to essays by ex-New Haven residents.

But the inevitable peril of this peculiar genre still afflicts My Harvard. My Yale: The book is filled with self-satisfied recollections of success Edward Weeks '22, the former editor of The Atlantic, thinks back to his undergraduate years and what should come to him but this vignette:

When I went to collect my papers from the pigeonholes at Warren House. I stood beside handsome John Gaston, late of the Marines, now a tough varsity end who was in my section watching me riffle through my A's, he exploded. "What the hell have you been up to?"

One wishes Gaston and his tough varsity muscles had exercised less restraint in his explosion.

When the journalist Faye Levine '65 considers her days at Radcliffe, she wastes no time in recalling the response she received to a Crimson article called "The Three Flavors of Radcliffe," a wretched piece of pop-sociology which said Radcliffe students were all peach, chocolate, or lime (a breakdown that corresponds roughly to today's preppies, nerds, and flakes):

It would be amusing to report that I was ostracized by my friends or even expelled for having given the game away...Yet, on the whole, the reception was favorable David Reisman called "The Three Flavors" brilliant A Radcliffe dean told Madenoiselle magazine I was "the most articulate girl at Radcliffe"--for which I received a ten-dollar prize. The Associated Press sent me on a mission to investigate the chocolate, peach, and limeness of the other seven sisters.

Similarly, James Atlas '71, now an editor at The Atlantic, feels compelled to recall that he read every book on his pre-freshman-year reading list, and he mentions parenthetically that his choices of posters from the Coop were Van Gogh and Picasso. The writer Beth Gutcheon '67 notes that she could have made it through her Dickens tutorial by skimming Martin Chuzzlewit and a few others. "Of course," she adds, "if you should happen to wade through every word Dickens wrote--and of course I did--you would certainly find that there were rewards and memorable resonance even in the dregs."

STILL, there are undeniable pleasures to a book like My Harvard. My Yale, especially for a current student at one of the two. Chief among them are the illuminating contrasts it provides: between two different experiences at the same university, and also between one campus and the other. Benjamin Spock (of Baby and Child Care fame) and Thomas Bergin, now a Yale Italian professor, both went to Yale in the class of '25, and both write vividly of being outcasts from a rock-ribbed social structure that bestowed status upon athletes and club-members alone. Spock overcame his loneliness by becoming a hard-working crew star (and eventually feels guilty that the chief pursuit of his college years has been the selfish one of improving his social standing.

Bergin, on the other hand, suffers from the familiar tendency of hostages to fall in love with their captors. He writes: "If the football captain never spoke to me (why should he?), that did not prevent me from cheering madly for him in the Bowl." And with astonishing sympathy, he concludes.

Collectively, the wealthy and well dressed fraternity youths were not offensively snobbish. They were, quite simply, unaware of the existence of the lower orders. They didn't scott my sort, they simply felt we had nothing much to offer I must admit, in my case, they were perfectly right.

Other contrasts J Anthony Lukas '55, now a prize winning journalist, writes sensitively of Harvard's insularity from the rest of Cambridge and Boston, which he strives to overcome by reading and writing about tension between working-class Catholics and Yankee intellectuals. Robert Coles '50, professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, discusses the same insularity, but his efforts at horizon-expansion culminate in a mealy-mouthed dpiphany in a drugstore, where a kind counter woman revives him after he faints, moving him to conclude, "There are some people in this world who don't need courses in Social Relations to enable a firm, shrewd grasp of various social and psychological particulars."

More recently, Jesse Kornbluth '68 provides a revealing glimpse of the most difficult Harvard of all for a current undergraduate to picture: a place where the students seemed to be in perpetual rage and confusion over miscarriages of social justice. Remembering a furtive meeting to plot a demonstration against Robert S. McNamara's 1966 visit to Quincy House, Kornbluth recalls "trying to figure out some way to sneak human limbs out of the lab so we could throw them at McNamara and rejecting all suggestions that we settle for bones from the butcher shop and chicken blood--'no symbols,' I said." There are always wild-eyed revolutionaries at Harvard, but this was the vice-president of the staid Signet Society, the managing editor of the Advocate.

The Atlantic's Atlas, by comparison, seems to have spent his college years concerned exclusively with genteel institutions, oblivious to the tumult around him. Atlas is the only student in My Harvard, My Yale who was at Harvard during the 1969 student takeover of University Hall, but he makes not even passing reference to that explosive event. In fact, the only intrusion of 60s turbulence into Atlas' world takes place, amusingly, at the Signet, when Allen Ginsberg lights up a joint at a black-tie literary dinner. (I suddenly caught a whiff of a pungent, acrid odor that seemed...well, odd in these circumstances.")

More intriguing are a few recurring disparities between Harvard memories and Yale memories. Yale students of the 50s and 60s, if this volume is any indication, were infinitely more occupied with soul-searching quests for meaning of life than their Harvard counter-parts. The screenwriter Herbert Wright (Yale '69) unbelievably puts the quest in exactly those terms: "I misspent much of my youth...in search of an answer to my burning big question: Is There Meaning to Life?" Richard Rhodes (Yale '59) is worse: he goes on for 10 tortured pages in John Leonard gibberish about his search for an elusive all-purpose Answer he dubs "the structure." As in, "I mean the structure was there, in place, to perturb and energize the shells and at least graze the nucleus."

Surprisingly, only one of the 24 contributors to My Harvard, My Yale raises the burning big question that keeps bothering this aspiring alumnus: why should Harvard and Yale be singled out as worthy of printing up--and more to the point; purchasing--a collection of memoirs by their graduates? The book's editor, Diana Dubois, concedes the role snob appeal plays in forming her book's allure: the two universities, she writes in her introduction, "combine) like their Oxbridge cousins in England, to situate a competitive 'heaven' in America (at least for entering freshmen and sentimental alums)."

But snob appeal is pretty thin stuff to bind a book with, and, in the end, it is important to remember the words with which Benjamin C. Bradlee '43 closes his essay:

What perspective encompasses these randors memoirs of My Harvard? Are they intrinsically any more interesting than My Bates. My Beloit? Surely not